Category Archives: Paradigm

“The “therapeutic alliance” between clinician and client is a key ingredient in successful treatment, responsible for better clinical outcomes and lower rates of dropout. Biogenetic explanations held by clinicians can impair the therapeutic relationship and those held by clients can impede their recovery.” Nick Haslam

The intention [here] is to provide a structured learning resource which will assist people to understand the requirements and skills for effective peer work.

Recovery from mental ill health is an individual experience which takes place in a broader social, political and historical context.

We are uniquely placed as peers to support people’s recovery in many different working environments. Peer workers support clients’ recovery not only through utilising their lived experience of mental ill health but drawing on the strategies they employed and skills they learned in the pursuit of health and wellbeing.

Peer workers bring their experience and skills not only to support and advocate for clients, but to collaborate and partner with clients and colleagues.

“Recovery” was meant to be the bright new idea of mental health policy. For many service users, however, it has become code for cutting support and trying to push people off benefits and into employment. The rhetoric of “user involvement” carries less conviction as the sector is reshaped more by a push to privatisation than by the appeal for parity of esteem with physical health policy….

“…their daily routine unfolded much the way Leriadis had described it: Wake naturally, work in the garden, have a late lunch, take a nap. At sunset, they either visited neighbors or neighbors visited them. Their diet was also typical: a breakfast of goat’s milk, wine, sage tea or coffee, honey and bread. Lunch was almost always beans (lentils, garbanzos), potatoes, greens (fennel, dandelion or a spinachlike green called horta) and whatever seasonal vegetables their garden produced; dinner was bread and goat’s milk. At Christmas and Easter, they would slaughter the family pig and enjoy small portions of larded pork for the next several months… “

Being labeled ‘mentally ill’ can be an enormous burden: on individuals, their families, and their friends. It’s a label that can hang like an albatross around someone’s neck, instead of serving as a guide to the most appropriate support.The evolution of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” – the ‘bible’ of American psychiatry – is a classic illustration of this process at work…

Concepts of suffering and anguish have always varied across historical and cultural contexts, and they manifest in the body in many different ways. For example, the autism spectrum has variously positioned people as being intertwined with the spirit world and deserving of elevated status, or disabled to the point of requiring highly-specialized treatment for remediation…

Psychiatric concepts, methods of research and even data are not ‘givens.’ They are all embedded in social systems, and shaped by cultural, political and economic forces…

Generally, prolonged withdrawal syndrome is not recognized by medicine. You will find very few doctors to diagnose it and still fewer to treat it. This is a collection of links that might help you educate yourself so that you can find more appropriate care when the time comes as well as hopefully avoiding falling ill at all.

It’s often quite easy to see why someone might be low in mood, or panicky, or hearing voices telling them they are worthless. Sometimes the reasons are less obvious, and we arrange to meet again once we know the client better…

A typical person might have been bullied, neglected or abused as a child; subjected to domestic violence as an adult; and now be on benefits and struggling to feed and clothe their children.

Help for people who understand that one key to recovery is understanding the meaning voices have in the context of lived experience, and that as suppressing voices with medication only works for some, other ways, more ethical of working are crucial in modern mental health work.